Connext NXTP live, OVM 2.0 is coming and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #219 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where recap the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 29th of september 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so vitalik's back with another i guess kind of a proposal this time around account abstraction so he worked on this with a few other people uh and the reason why this proposal is so interesting is because it doesn't require an ethereum consensus a layer change so it doesn't require like a hard fork it doesn't need to be an eip it's actually um an erc so erc 4337 which is basically uh a i mean an aic is a standard on ethereum obviously a lot of you will be familiar with what erc20s are it's like the standard for for a token on ethereum and

there's ercs for nfts and stuff like that and these standards do not require any changes to the base layer protocol so people use these as a way to do a number of different things without kind of like needing to get anything into the base layer through a hard fork and through an eip now for those of you who don't know what account abstraction is it's basically been something that's been around in the ethereum community for quite a while now it's been the dream to get this kind of like implemented within ethereum and i should take a step back and explain to you why it's kind of desirable well ethereum currently has two account types it has what's called an externally owned account or eoa you may have seen that talked about before and a smart contract account now the way it currently works is that when you want to deploy a smart

contract you have to deploy it from an ela so you'll have an externally owned account that is just like a normal ethereum wall that you and i have and will deploy a smart contract now if you want to interact with that smart contract whether that you're a kind of like i guess a user or a or the developer itself you have to basically interact with it through your your user account through your externally owned account you can't interact through interact with it directly um with the smart contract account so uh that leads to a number of i guess like inefficiencies higher gas costs due to an extra step to interact with it and stuff like that and also doesn't allow us to do fancy things like in uh in protocol account account abstraction and stuff like that now if you want to learn more about like technical details

here definitely go read vitalik's blog post that he has here explaining how this is supposed to work but he did uh put down the bottom here a bunch of kind of like use cases and i think the the most practical use case for something like this that users will get a lot of um i guess use out of is something called uh sponsored transactions which allows application developers to pay fees on behalf of their users which is a really big deal and also allows users to pay fees in erc20 tokens with a contract serving as an intermediary to collect the erc20s and pay in eighth which means you would be able to pay your transactions in something like a stablecoin instead of having to pay it in eighth yes of course eighth is still going to be the token paid at the base layer but by doing this it allows the

user to pay in whatever they have in their wallet so if i'm understanding this correctly it would mean that there's no more uh requiring users to have ether in their wallet to pay for transaction fees it would all be handled by the application developer or kind of like whatever smart contract you're interacting with which is obviously a huge user experience boon right i mean how many times have i have uh people kind of like um or like i mean this has happened to me a few times before but i'm sure it's happened to a lot of you you before where you've had an account you wanted to do something but you ran out of eighth for gas so you didn't have any eight for gas and you have to go get it from a centralized exchange you'll send it from another wallet and then if

you don't want to tie your wallets together you have to go through a centralized exchange just like a washer or you have to go through tornado cache or something like that to get that eighth into your new account there to do anything with these kind of things um you know with with this erc being widely adopted basically if you only had usdc in your account you would be able to use that usdc to pay for the the gas fee and it would all be handled by the application here which is obviously really really cool and a huge user experience boom but there's a bunch of other things that fall into this as well i've talked about another proposal that was um that was put forward to kind of like i guess merge these things together like the externally owned account and the smart contract accounts together i can't

remember exactly what the eip was but i think it's eip three something something something and obviously being an eip it would require an ethereum hard fork to to get it into the protocol and it requires a base layer protocol change um and what that would would allow people to do is do transactions where you could basically bundle the approved token transaction and the swap transaction into one so for example when you go to uni swap and you have to approve a new token for trading instead of having to do that with something like this you could basically have like a bundle of these transactions where essentially the user only has to do one transaction to approve the token and the swap and and they could pay in any kind of like currency they wanted for that as well which i think is really really cool

obviously it's all about improving the user experience and this is definitely something that people should be paying attention to it just came out a couple hours ago so definitely go give this a read i'm sure people are going to keep digesting this and probably someone will do a nice little explainer thread on twitter for it i'll definitely retweet that if i see anything but i think vitalik does a great job of explaining it in this blog post anyway so definitely go check that one out alright so mahalo from polygon highlighted highlighted an interesting stat i think that that happened i guess over the past few days is that the polygon pos chain's daily active users or daily active addresses i should say has eclipsed ethereum l1 and daily active addresses for the first time now as you all know uh the polygon post

trend is in a layer 2 it is a side chain to ethereum but it you know it's still somewhere where i guess like people are kind of bridged out from ethereum to go to to experience cheaper d5 and things like that and cheaper nft stuff um the reason why i wanted to highlight this stat was not so much i guess like uh to show kind of like polygon flipping ethereum l1 here but more so to show that i think going forward as we get more of these scalability solutions online or these layer twos online the daily active addresses for l1 should either it should trend down or should kind of go sideways i don't foresee it going up because layer one has already priced out a lot of users so where are the new users coming from like none of the new people that are coming into crypto are going to

well most of them maybe some of them will but most of them aren't going to use ethereum layer 1 because they've been priced out of it completely like you can't expect a new user who's coming with a hundred dollars who just wants to try out defy to spend half of that on transaction fees that's just not going to work so that means that ethereum l1 active addresses is either going to stagnate or go down over time which is totally fine that's exactly what you can see in this this chart uh i mean this chart doesn't go far it doesn't go back that far it's about nine days worth of data here but i've been looking at this and i'll cover this on the on the data pump that i do that i will be doing this weekend um but basically i think uh we have to kind

of like just look at these scalability solutions as the place where these daily active kind of like users and addresses are going to be these l2s are going to have millions and millions tens of millions hundreds of millions of eventually daily active users and ethereum l1 because it's inherently limited and it's not going to to to scale uh for for for users it's going to scale for our layer twos you're going to end up in this situation where looking at layer one metrics for ethereum it just isn't going to tell you much anymore i think the best metrics for monitoring on layer one are going forward are going to be things like uh transaction volume settled so the amount of kind of like uh um amounts settled on the networks like trillions of dollars of settlements happening there you also have to kind of

like have a way to unpack the amount of dollars being settled on l2s and then kind of like unpack that in the batches that are posted to l1 i'm sure there'll be tools to kind of extract this uh but other things also include kind of like the fee revenue of course that that's paid on layer one that's obviously a huge deal not just for the fee burn but just to kind of like see the usage of l1 and we just we can't measure l1 by kind of like active addresses and stuff like that to see the health of the ethereum l1 network it would definitely be stuff in the l2 world but still cool to see i guess like this happening from polygon you know i mean i guess like a i've given the disclosure plenty of times and i'm advised at a polygon here i'm not trying to shield it

too hard but i think what's interesting about the pos chain is the kind of like incentive program that they had and i'm going to talk about this tweet from paulina i think it's here actually yeah i'll talk about this in a sec but basically when it comes to incentives and like incentivizing the usage of layer 2s and scalability solutions and kind of like anything really at the end of the day any base layers or like apps or whatever the mark of a good liquidity mining program is if it actually leads to sustainable growth in the long term and that's exactly what happened with the polygon chain they had that massive liquidity mining program where they paid out magic rewards and they got people on board onto the pos chain and it's been sticky they've been able to grow their kind of like the daily active addresses they've been able to

grow their tvl on different apps which again tbr is becoming a bit of a crappy metric or has become a crappy metric which i'm going to go over as well at probably at the end of the refuel um but those kind of metrics what we need to look at and on the liquidity mining front i did want to point out something uh that paulie now tweeted out uh where they said tokens are critical for roll-up projects interesting data point from dydx daily volumes when the token was announced shot up from 25 million to 300 million and you'll remember when i was covering dydx and i think i said on the refill like just wait until they add a token and i didn't even expect it to grow this quickly but it has but um they released their token and they quickly went from 300 million dollars of daily volumes to

9 billion which is more than every centralized exchange right now i believe absolutely massive obviously diy dx token has gone up a bit in price lately over the past week i think it's like doubled or past couple of weeks or something like that people are earning token awards and all that good stuff but um i think what i wanted to point out here was something i wrote about in the newsletter today and that's the sustainability of liquidity mining programs i mean we all saw plenty of these well i mean we've all seen plenty of these things play out over the last i guess you could say 18 months i would say that i mean i would argue that synthetics are pioneered liquidity mining in early 2019 where they did their staking where they paid snx rewards out to um snx stakers and then compound popularized the model but when

they launched their token in june of 2020 which kickstarted d5 summer which led to you know the the countless amounts of liquidity mining programs in in that kind of like window of time but then all through 2021 we've seen different ones whether it be for base layers that are trying to get traction for layer twos for different apps it's all been happening and we've been able to run these experiments over and over again and i think the prevailing theme here is that a lot of applications are overpaying for uh you know our customer acquisition strategy which is exactly what these things are they're trying to bootstrap growth by paying people to use the products now for a few these things fail for a few reasons one the product doesn't have product market fit it really only had uh attention because of the liquidity

mining uh two there's uh liquidity mining locusts who come along they should they basically mine all the tokens they dump the token price and then the community is left to pick up the scraps but essentially you're left with a community that may be underwater on their investments which obviously doesn't doesn't end too well for a lot of communities um or three they have a liquidity mining program and it's just not working it's not doing what it should be doing it's not attracting new capital the app's kind of stagnated now that could also be for other reasons like maybe the app can't scale and they've been on ethereum layer one and it's very hard for them to get any more traction because they need to move to layer two there's a lot that goes into it and maybe they have just really bad marketing or business development

it's not black and white it's it's kind of like multi-faceted here so i think there's been a few really good examples of liquidity mining that has led to sustainable growth obviously i was talking about the polygon pos chain i think the index corp did a really good job here as well they had a very conservative conservative liquidity mining program and still do they didn't have like a pool 2 or a native token incentivized pool where essentially the native token of the project has a pool on say uni swap or sushi swap or whatever and then the protocol is paying out token awards to be in that pool that was known during d5 summer and even to today was known as like exit liquidity pool where the pool ones where the people kind of like farming the token awards um outside of that side of the pool too were dumping

their token awards into the pool too so it wasn't a good model it led to a lot of death spirals and token prices and all that sort of stuff so yeah i think that people have learned from this products have learned from this i think you know do a dexa's liquidity mining program seems to be quite quite good it definitely is paying a lot of money out right now though they i think they paid 27 000 tokens for the last two weeks worth of liquidity mining um and that was what 27 000 times the current price of 25 it's a lot of money right it's a lot of money to be paying for uh for liquidity money tens of millions of dollars there um but i guess that's because the token price is high 27 000 tokens out of their total supply of what i think the total supply is like for i

kind of remember what it is maybe 100 million tokens or something like that um and they're kind of getting it out there it remains to be seen what's going to happen to dydex's token price it has a really high market cap uh fully diluted market cap already of 25 billion dollars but it also has a lot of traction right like it's it's doing a ton of a ton of volume it has a lots of new users a lot of attention on it but i can't say what's going to happen with the price at all like i have no idea what's gonna happen there's still only five percent of the around around five percent of the token supply circulating so we'll see what happens in the long run i've seen this game before it usually ends in kind of like the token bleeding out over time

but we'll have to see how it plays out there i'm not going to tell you if it will or will not bleed out over time but it's going to be interesting to to see what happens over the next few months there um and speaking of polly now moving on to the layer 2 stuff now they put out another great uh tweet today where they said this is an opportune moment to repost this fantastic graphic by emco scp from reddit this is the multi-chain future just not the way everyone thinks it's modular not monolithic with ethereum at the heart of it until we see a better security chain and you know what i love i love this about paulina they aren't an eth maxi but they recognize that ethereum is the best security chain right now for for layer twos and to be honest as i've

explained plenty of times on the refill at this point i don't think any chain is going to be able to catch ethereum in terms of security and decentralization um because ethereum is not a static thing ethereum is not bitcoin ethereum is moving forward ethereum is always trying to improve itself whereas bitcoin is static so it's very easy to catch bitcoin when it comes to security and decentralization but it's very uh at least for ethereum i think it was was relatively easy whereas um to catch ethereum is relatively very difficult but anyway this chart here um is is great i mean you can see exactly what i've been speaking about lately you have ethereum in the yellow here which has basically the execution uh execution layers kind of like uh and the consensus layer and the data shards now the execution layer is being fed

into from roll-ups the data shards are obviously uh when we have sharding you'll be able to put roll up transaction proofs and all that sort of stuff on the data shards and the consensus layer is the beacon chain i mean i'm talking about like a post merge world in in the current world it's kind of like the proof of work uh uh kind of content consensus but in the in the future it's going to be the beacon chain which is the consensus layout and then you not only have rollouts but you have like validiums and volitions and side chains and alt layer ones which all act as the execution layer as i've spoken about before which is basically the compute layer as i i spoke about that yesterday about the commoditization of compute where the real kind of like moat becomes the decentralization and security of the

chain that the compute layers are kind of like uh pulling into or kind of like bridging into and out of and securing themselves on so i just thought this was a great little chart to kind of point out uh definitely if you're listening to the podcast i mean this will be linked in the youtube description you can go check it out uh but i'll be talking more about this on the ama on saturday actually there's a few questions around this and then people want me to explain like the difference between validiums and volitions and how this all works so i'll definitely be talking about it on the ama join the discord channel for full details on the ama there but moving on um speaking of i guess like dydx eli ben sassoon assassin sorry i should say uh from stockwear point uh tweeted out this

interesting chart here where he said that uh starkware has been sorry dydx has been doing 10 tps 10 transactions per second with peaks above 25 transactions per second over the past 12 hours this is higher than bitcoin and ethereum for a fraction of the gas cost and you know what's always funny about uh about these sorts of things is you know someone asked how high can this go in and theoretically can go to 10 000 transactions per second or more but look at how much traction dydx is having and how much volumes they're having and they're not even getting to above kind of like uh you know 25 transactions per uh sorry they're not even getting to like 30 transactions per second here so this is why i always find it funny where people

don't realize just how much space you know we're kind of like bringing online on the compute layer and how good rollups are going to be even at you know a thousand transactions per second like even the generalized ones yes that space is going to get filled up eventually but in the short to medium term we still have time to grow these things out we still have time to deploy these things right and build them right and then scale it up to hundreds of thousands if millions tens of millions maybe one day billions of transactions per second like it's it's kind of hard to fathom how much throughput that is for these kind of uh things here and and how much activity there's gonna be like these uh layer two exchanges they're gonna be doing trillions of dollars of volume one day like and and that that day is coming

quite soon i mean uh dydex as i said is doing nine billion dollars of 24 hour volume and and it's so small still like the people the unique traders on there is very small i would say that 95 plus percent of traders haven't actually traded on dydx yet so from that perspective just absolutely incredible uh kind of like growth there with this kind of like tps numbers now it's funny because when you think about tps and think about kind of like i guess the limits of it ethereum can do i think if every transaction on ethereum was a just a simple eth transfer which is the cheapest transaction you can do ethereum could theoretically do 45 tps 45 transactions per second but in reality the ethereum chain is using

being used for much more than just a simple eighth sends so we average about 15 transactions per second maybe a little bit less than that and that's like the maximum unless we raise the gas limit and if obviously if we raise the gas limit we hit that ceiling really quickly again and the fees just go up anyway whereas and that means that like the amount of transactions per day that can go into i guess like the chain amount of activity that can happen is constrained and logically it flows that only the most high value use cases will be using ethereum layer one because they're the only things that can afford the higher gas fees but then you turn to the layer two world where you have tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of transactions per second um getting to that you know and reach reaching that

kind of like capacity in a kind of like constant demand ongoing way is going to happen one day but it's still a little bit of a far out i think that's going to happen in a world where we're kind of i guess like probably at the edge of like the early adopter phase where we're moving on to kind of like the mainstream phase where one of these layer twos have just kind of like um experienced an incredible amount of growth experienced incredible amount of network effect and it's really kind of like just overtaking the whole scene whether it be your arbitrary optimism zk stuff like uh starkware zk sync hermes whatever it is right at the end of the day um then you're gonna see kind of like uh that stuff fill up but i think the funny thing is by that point we're gonna have just so much capacity

um through these kind of like uh layer twos and stuff like that that we're never gonna talk about this stuff anymore we're just gonna talk about the fact that people can use these things really really cheaply because the the transaction phase on diy dx are free right now and i think they're gonna be free in the future and i'm talking about gas fees because dydx can sustain itself and still post proofs to uh to layer one and still secure itself on layer one ethereum by just using the trading fees of their exchange which is a really really good business model it basically means that dy dex is making revenue their costs are they cost to secure themselves on ethereum and obviously a bunch of other costs like personnel and and marketing and whatever else they're using they're kind of like funds for but uh that just factors into another cost

for them that's the same thing that's going to happen for every layer two at the end of the day they're not gonna have an issue paying for layer one security if they get traction like obviously the layer twos that don't get traction are gonna have an issue but i'm expecting all the top ones to you know to not have an issue with this sort of thing here so yeah really really cool stat from eli here and just had my brain kind of like spinning uh earlier today uh speaking of layer twos as well optimism i've announced the dates for ovm 2.0 this is the major upgrade that they have coming out for the optimistic virtual uh machine here and i've spoken about how i think that once this update is rolled out they're going to remove their white list and the floodgates are going to open for optimism but

essentially uh 2.0 is going live live on the covant test net on october 14th mainnet will be october 28th and it'll be four to six hours of downtime on those days uh and then you know if you want to join their discord channel you can keep up to date there with announcements and all that sort of stuff but yeah this is exciting um i think that there this update's coming with reduced gas costs which is really cool it's also the update that allows for evm equivalents not just evm compatibility which is a really big deal and i'm excited to see how many projects deployed to optimism once their wireless is removed which as i said i assume is going to happen after this uh this goes live so yeah i guess like another about a month out until this goes live not too long to be honest i mean i'm

probably going to still be locked down at that point so time just kind of like blurs together for me these days so i am kind of like a very patient person uh but yeah still still exciting to see there's some dates around this um bridges more news out of bridges here so connects uh it connects nxtp is officially live on mainnet with support for arbitrary polygons pos chain the xdi chain phantom and bsc so what is an nxtp it's basically a base protocol for transferring assets and calling contracts between ethereum domains uh chains plus l2 uh it's unique in three ways and that's trustless extensible and capital efficient and you can use it at xpollinate.io to kind of like bridge between these chains um and if you want

to learn more about it you can definitely check out this thread from xtr so just another bridge live right like i mean i feel like i've been talking about bridges non-stop on the refuel for like months now and it's just because it's just fascinating how fast these things came to market given that the l2s are just now rolling out and the bridges were just waiting they're just like yeah we're ready we can deploy these things you know come use us you don't have to worry about withdrawal delays or anything like that don't have to worry about capital inefficiency we've got the solutions here so super excited about that i mean a disclosure i'm an investor in connects tr but this follows kind of like my logic and thesis around the l2 and and bridge space where again i'm going to answer this question in more detail on

the ama on saturday but it's kind of like where i'm placing all my bets right l2's bridges all the supporting infrastructure around that the next five years i believe and this is an investment advice but i believe those are the best investments in both kind of like fun in both a financial way and your social capital way in this space because i i went over the other day on the refill where i said you know 2016 or 2021 was the layer one era where all these layer ones were battling it out and they were kind of like messy and a lot of them were shitty and scams and just like stupid projects and then we're gonna have the l2 era which includes things like bridges in over the next five plus years and i think that people betting in on these ecosystems getting involved uh you know

both with them their money and their kind of like time it's going to pay off in a very big way i have so much confidence in the layout to ecosystem and the kind of like bridge ecosystem here and just like things around that like rari capitals nova and starkware's dmm and any other stuff there that i'm literally putting as much kind of like time and effort and money as i can into these things i'm betting on them with everything at the end of the day obviously like buying eth is a better it as well because it's all gonna you know a lot of that value is gonna flow to e through the fee burn and other kind of mechanisms um but just like making more targeted bets as well is something that i've been doing lately so the i mean i you know as i've said like

i expect pretty much everything to have a token so if you want to get exposure to this sort of stuff because i don't know if any of these sorts of things are going to do public sales like i doubt they will just use the apps use connects use hot protocol use arbitrarily use optimize just use everything use starkware and you can do that in multiple ways like you use immutable x and diversify and diy dx obviously um just use it all do do do do it all like even if it cost you like like 50 or 100 worth of fees to bridging and to just do all these sorts of stuff i'm telling you now it's most likely going to be worth it once all these tokens start coming out these airdrops start coming as i mentioned before i expect these protocols to be worth billions tens of

billions of dollars because they are definitely the future and where everyone is kind of like going towards anyway i'm going to leave it at that i'm going to go over in more detail about this sort of stuff on the ama on saturday so definitely kind of like check that out uh and another thing on bridges etherscan has added a feature where you can basically click here it'll show you on the contract this is the arbitrary bridge you can click the the little link here and it'll take you directly to the arbitration bridge so a little bit of a quality of life improvement there they also have a bun a kind of i guess like um a list of different bridges on on blockscan.com here where you can basically go through it and see what where the bridges are what what contract the dress they're at and all that good

stuff there so really really cool feature from etherscan um another project that i came across yesterday for the first time it's another layer two project another zero knowledge project called uh and their team is called scroll tech and they're um working on a zke evm so similar to what the polygon hermes project is working on uh and this is really exciting i mean you can have a read here of what they're doing but i'm super excited that i found just another layer two project that's working on a layer two specifically for ethereum and specifically around a zk evm uh and you know obviously using zero knowledge proofs and all that sort of stuff so definitely go check this out if you haven't already i think i'm coming up on time here so i'm gonna power through the rest of the updates today um danny ryan posted another finalized blog

post uh number 29 with uh details on altair which i went over yesterday and the merge that is coming so uh the merge as i said is like the the thing that's kind of like i guess i'm gonna be the theme over the coming months but uh the an initial merge interop specs are out right now and the engineers are busy preparing code bases for the coming devnets in october as i've discussed before uh these are this is the first step we have the devnets then we have the test nets then we have mainnet so expect obviously this to take a little while but if everything goes well on the devnets and on the test nets man that will come sooner but i say that not everything always goes well there's a lot of you know like stuff going on here the merge is a big effort definitely not

something that's going to happen overnight but great to see an update uh from from danny ryan yeah so definitely go check this out it's got relevant links to everything um and speaking of i guess like uh eth2 chainsafe has published nodewatch.io which is a website to keep track of ethereum consensus nodes aka eth2 nodes so you can see here the node count this is the beacon node count this is not validators so um one beacon node can have like potentially an unlimited amount of validators talking to it depending on the hardware that's backing it to be able to service those those validators but these are basically the equivalent to a full node on eth1 um because there's the beacon node and there's a validator client so there's currently 3794 beacon nodes that are that are

basically able to be scanned by this tool publicly accessible there could be more uh these tools are just measurements uh just kind of like uh best best guess measurements they are definitely not 100 accurate because it's very hard to get 100 accurate kind of view of the network but you can see here this also gives regional information there's 60 countries participating in eth2 right now which is really really cool only 40 of those nodes are hosted nodes and 60 of them are non-hosted nodes so um if a node is running on a network other than a cloud service uh then it's considered non-hosted so basically home stakers which is really cool you can see the node count by countries here obviously the usa is leading at 25 germany coming in second at 20

france at 15 and then you have a bunch of the minorities here australia is only 2.2 percent uh with only 87 beacon nodes there so i'm uh you know i've got i've got my my little share there but i mean i think it's actually pretty distributed considering kind of like the population you have to do obviously a population based distribution here scroll down you have node statistics as i was talking about like prism leading the charge here on the nodes node account and then lighthouse coming in second uh and then the rest of them are kind of like being minority clients here that should obviously change over time right and that should definitely um uh with there's obviously a big push to get prism to be less of the network as well so really cool tool here definitely go check it out i'll link it in the youtube

description uh dopex a uh a kind of like decentralized i think options protocol yeah options protocol here has announced that they're migrating to arbitrom so they're going to be migrating on monday 4th of october and how to get involved and take advantage of this is all in the their discord channel so definitely go join that this will be linked in the youtube description um matcha has announced that they've launched gasless trading in open beta today so matches a decentralized exchange aggregator on ethereum supporting a bunch of different chains out there as well but essentially the reason that they're able to do this is because they've got market makers that complete these orders and the thing is you'll get a slightly worse price than you would if you paid the gas fees um and and basically the

logic is is that yes you're getting a slightly worse price because the market maker is essentially paying the gas fees for you but it's just i guess like a user experience boom here which i think is is is pretty good at the end of the day i think a lot of when i think about like the just like mainstream user and what they actually care about i think about metamask and their swap feature where they actually charge 0.8 fees on top of the 0.3 that a lot of the decentralized exchanges already charge so a user end user is paying 1.1 percent uh in fees and they're happy to do that and they're paying the gas fees right through through minima swap because it's just convenient they don't have to worry about anything else they just do it through that and they're all good to go

and the same goes for centralized exchanges people pay one percent two percent fees without even blinking an eye and why would you when you're buying an asset you're expecting it to go uh go up in value much more than one or two percent that's just like a cost of doing business to you now obviously if you're a trader like an actively trading those fees are going to eat into your profitability so you worry more about that but matcha doesn't really target traders i mean matcha is targeting the retail investor the ones who are just like buying something wanting to sit on it for a while so i don't think they're going to care too much about um you're getting a slightly worse price for saving on gas costs it's just like kind of like flipping the the cost um i guess like paradigm here over to uh to

kind of like a slightly worse price in return for paying no gas fees so uh yeah still cool to see that coming out of matcha there um another thing uh maybe maybe i'm going to go over time here because this is something important that i wanted to talk about i was mentioning before how i don't think tvl total value locked is a good metric at all anymore uh for a number of different reasons i've written about this in the in the delegate newsletter before but the major reasons are tbr is fleeting right and it's fleeting because of liquidity mining like you can get a billion do billion three billion dollars of liquidity really really quickly if you pay a lot of token uh a token uh incentives for it but if you uh if those token incentives run out which they eventually do or they don't become

as lucrative because the token price dumps then the tbr is going to leave as well so we should be looking at both sustainable tvl but also other metrics and make uh uh the make it out growth kind of like twitter account here tweeted out a little meme and for maker you would look at outstanding loans the organic revenue that's being generated the amount of diet that's issued the psm fees the peg stability module fees burned mkr tokens and general market share as well as a bunch of other kind of like things around that like uh you know general awareness um analytics of the sites that tap into maker and kind of like the users there the amount of unique addresses holding die all that sort of stuff right that is much better at measuring a growth of a protocol and measuring the kind of like metrics around a protocol

than tv alleys i think tvl is a vanity metric i think the more projects use it the less i think of a project if they if they use it to show kind of like anything i guess like uh any kind of signal around their project definitely focus on the stuff that makes your project unique and the stuff that actually generates organic growth and organic revenue for the protocol i think that's really really important all right last thing here talking about stable coins uh angle protocol has announced that they've raised a five million dollar round led by a16z with participation from a bunch of other uh kind of like investors here and they're building a derivatives backed stablecoin and uh for a more inclusive default as they put it here so if you want to read more about this definitely check out the blog post but again another kind of like

stablecoin project that's um that's kind of been been announced here and obviously being built here they uh i mean i think it's funny because like solving or becoming the biggest stable coin in crypto and defy and biggest decentralized one especially is the holy grail like your tam is everyone everyone uses stable coins right like absolutely everyone's going to use them in the world so if you can kind of like get your get traction there and grow yourself and even carve out like a small piece of that pie which is a quadrillion dollar pie eventually like maybe hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of kind of like trading volumes and then quadrillion dollars worth of trading volumes as well if you can just i guess like carve out a small kind of like

piece of that pie it's very lucrative so that's why you're seeing so many stable coin projects pop up but anyway go check this out it'll be linked in the youtube description but i'm going to end today's uh episode there so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone